


Enamoured

by AlchemyAlice



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M, architecture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-05
Updated: 2010-12-05
Packaged: 2017-10-23 02:16:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/245149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlchemyAlice/pseuds/AlchemyAlice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mal had known. She must have. Arthur hadn’t exactly been subtle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Enamoured

Mal had known. She must have. Arthur hadn’t exactly been subtle. But how could he have been? It was impossible to escape Dom’s pull; how else could a poor architecture student have landed a woman of such sophistication, such sharp intelligence and wit and ambition. Cobb was like a lighthouse—a beacon in a life of meaningless work and mundanity. 

For the first three years of knowing him, it had been exceedingly inconvenient. Nowadays, however, the thing Arthur feels most often is sort of a detached resignation that only barely dulls the messy buzz of his admiration and disbelief and affection. 

But any sense of detachment goes flying out the window, almost literally, as they go under and Cobb presents him with blistering, glorious Dubai. They’re on the top of one of the many oil baron skyscrapers, looking out over the skyline. Arthur sighs at the feel of warm wind and desert air and linen trousers, and sees that Cobb is doing the same. But then Cobb casts a hand out over the skyline, like a king surveying his land. 

“Stupid buildings,” he says in vague disgust. “The lot of them. A waste of money and resources, and certain companies want to change all that—create a metropolis as opulent as before to appeal to the investors, but appropriate for the landscape, and with the environment in mind. So watch. We take their budgets, and we put them to good use, and…” 

The absurd mess of skyscrapers, with too much glass and asphalt and bloated helipads, collapses, implodes. 

And in their places grow things of beauty. Endless panels of glass, supported on impossible spires of platinum. Corinthian columns framing bright, clean surfaces, obsidian against bold shards of pale desert hues that capture the endless sunlight of the Arab Emirates. Arthur is breathless--the sheer spectacle awe inspiring, but what steals the air from his lungs is the look on Cobb’s face, the rapture of creation. He is golden in the desert sun, his pale suit luminescent against tan skin as his vision comes to life around him, and Arthur thinks fleetingly that in another life, Cobb would have been a sun god, a pharaoh. 

“This will never happen,” he says blankly. “It’s impossible.” 

“Sure,” Cobb shrugs. “But if you get enough people dreaming the impossible…maybe at some point it’ll be probable.” 

“Who the hell is paying you for a ‘maybe’?” 

Cobb smiles. “Well, no one for this, specifically. But this is the future of urban planning. I intend on securing ample funding once I acquire a few celebrity clients. I do live in L.A. for a reason, you know." 

Arthur shakes his head, smiling. "You're still insane." 

"Did you expect me not to be?" Cobb replies, quirking a smile. 

"I guess not." 

Arthur hadn't known what to expect, invited for the first time to the complete Cobb household when Mal was no longer part of it, and Cobb no longer needed to run. Perhaps the aftermath of grief resolved? Something like proper grieving, like Cobb never did? 

Certainly not this dive into the dreamworld, and its brilliant, shining potential, filled to the brim with Cobb's vision, Cobb's  _soul._  

Arthur turns his eyes to the skyline, and he sees her. 

She is radiant in white, wearing a shirtdress suitable for chic tourists at the height of summer. Her dark hair falls in curls beneath a wide-brimmed hat. She stands on the balcony of a hotel too fair, too elegant to be real. She is far enough away to be reduced to a slim silhouette, but Arthur still knows her. 

A taste a bit like wine turned long ago to vinegar rises in his mouth. 

Cobb follows the direction of his gaze and clicks his tongue. He comes closer, just slightly. Arthur can feel the heat of him like a second sun. 

"Just a memory now," Cobb says quietly. "Not a shade. How I remember her being, at the beginning. She inspired some of this, really." 

Arthur recognizes it--her far-reaching vision in the crests of the skyscrapers, her effortless beauty in the doric columns and Art Noveau flourishes in marble. "Only some?" he asks, unable to think of anything else to say. 

“Well, yeah,” Cobb replies. “I have other things in my life, now. Finally.” 

Arthur raises an eyebrow sidelong at him. Cobb is staring down at his hands now, hunched over the banister as if the panorama that surrounds him is nothing but a grayed out memory, and he looks profoundly, unimaginably ancient. 

“Cobb,” he starts, but Cobb cuts him off.

“I didn’t tell you how bad it was,” Cobb says, “Because I didn’t want to tell you how it started. I didn’t want to tell you that I’d already lived one life. I thought, maybe if you knew, you'd give up on me. God knows you should've.”

“I did the math,” Arthur says, because he’s mildly offended and because it bears saying. “For the time you were in limbo. Fifty-three years, give or take.” He refuses to address the second statement.

Cobb just says quietly, “Seemed like longer.”

“Cobb. That’s done now. She should be an indicator of that, if nothing else.” He gestures out at the balcony opposite, at Mal lounging, looking so beautiful and so distant. It makes something in Arthur’s chest twist.

“That’s what I’m trying to say,” Cobb says, following Arthur’s gaze and smiling at the sight, which almost makes it worse. “She was the only thing in my life for a lifetime. And now…now I’m finding that I have other things here.”

“James and Phillippa,” Arthur says, because that much is obvious, if nothing else. Cobb is always obvious about the really big things, but the small ones all hide in the old, over-worn shadows around his eyes. 

“Of course,” Cobb says, finally looking back up, squinting into the sunlight. “And you.”

It’s so unexpected that Arthur nearly laughs, but then he looks again at Cobb, really  _looks_ , and what he sees takes his breath away. 

Cobb in his white suit, hair tempered gold, surrounded by his creations, and yet laden with memories that weigh on him like those fifty years with the love of his life were purgatory. It’s impossible. 

“I haven’t done anything,” he says. 

“If you think that’s true,” Cobb replies, smiling only very slightly, “Then you need to explain to me how post-war Britain made it into the middle of the desert.”

Blinking, Arthur looks back out at the dreamscape. And indeed, beyond the more obvious lines and classical filigrees he sees the sharp ruled lines of art deco and dark shadows of futurism embedded in the framework of the skyscrapers, the decadent raj architecture impregnated with the doubt and exacting uncertainty of those artists who, in times of strife, had seen too much.

Arthur fleetingly manages to acknowledge that for all this time he’s always thought that his affinity for Kandinsky and late-wartime Nevinson had been purely aesthetic. And hasn’t he been foolish for imagining such a thing--there's always meaning closer to home than that.

Suddenly, Cobb is close. “It’s a different sort of job,” he murmurs, voice rough and heavy with experience. “But…do you think you could help?”

Arthur barely remembers what the job had been about. But he nods anyway. 

Cobb grips his elbow with a care and brittleness that reminds Arthur of delicacy and the grace of age, and he wonders insensibly if Cobb will get arthritis in a few decades, but when Cobb’s lips descend on his it feels anything but old. He feels warm and soft and all-encompassing, and Arthur has to open to it, he just has to.

The thin strain of  _Non, je ne regrette rien_  filters through the shine of sunlight and glass. And Arthur doesn’t want to wake up. 

When they part, Cobb seems whole and candescent, and when Arthur looks back out across the cityscape, Mal turns on her balcony to regard them both.

Arthur half expects her to pull out a sniper rifle, but all she does is smile and look away, her profile aligning with the buildings, a part of them.


End file.
